The present invention generally relates to a document forming or preparation method and a document forming or preparation apparatus. More specifically, the present invention is directed to a document forming or preparation method and an apparatus for forming or preparing a document, in which figures and documents are entered via input/output devices capable of representing graphic information.
In wordprocessors for forming documents with employment of computers, such as the apparatus described in JP-A-63-83861, there is employed a method in which control symbols are inserted in the documents to distinguish a formula portion from a sentence portion, and the attached formula portion is inputted, whereby the calculation contents of the thus inputted formula (for instance, A=2+3) are sequentially interpreted and after the calculation results are directly obtained, the numeral values obtained as the calculation results are assembled into the documents under production.
Also, in accordance with the document editing apparatus as described in JP-A-1-211067, a plurality of formula programs are stored in memories, the relevant formula program is selected when the formulae to be entered into the document are inputted, and then the numeral values are substituted for the selected formula program so as to obtain the calculation results. The calculation results are outputted to a predetermined region within the document under formation. That is to say, the process operation for displaying data having forms of documents and notes is independently performed with respect to the process operation for executing business calculations with input/output data, so that the data may be freely read/written between these process operations.
In the wordprocessor apparatus as described in JP-A-63-83861, arbitrary formulae with employment of the four rules of algebraic operators are inputted into the documents, and then the calculation results of the formulae may be outputted to the document. All of the formulae to be inputted other than the symbols indicative of the answers are represented by the operators and numeral values. However, when a formula is set, this formula is described as a symbol series in independent data files. Since it is necessary to utilize control signals to identify columns from which numeral values are taken out, for the formulae described in the data files, the formulae, and also column in which results of formulae are stored, which have been written with a free form in documents cannot be directly utilized. Further, since calculation contents of formulae are successively interpreted by an interpreter so as to obtain calculation results, there is another problem that data processing speeds are delayed when various data processing operations are combined with each other, which involve data input/output processing operations, and functional calculation operations with trigonometric functions, exponential functions and specific functions. In addition, no consideration is made that numeral values which are not contained in formulae are to be substituted for variables contained in the formulae, although only other numeral values contained in other formulae are employed as data used for formula computations.
On the other hand, in accordance with the document editing apparatus, the program to execute the business calculation process for forming notes and the like must be previously stored in the storage device. To this end, various types of formula programs suitable for various computation cases must be formed in advance and then stored in the storage device. However, it is very difficult to previously produce such various types of formula programs in order to accommodate various computation cases. Also, if there is no formula program suitable for a formula to be inputted into a document, the document forming work must be interrupted, and a suitable computation program formed and stored in the storage device.
In the above-described control devices according to the prior art, only the calculation results of the formulae are handled, no consideration is given that the numeral value data which are outputted as control instructions to the objects to be controlled are stored and are again utilized. Furthermore, since the formulae are directly entered into the separate data files in the symbol series, no specific care is taken in combination with the documents.